Any reason this wouldn't be able to display the controls or Players columns properly? I'm trying to create lists for like, trackball games or 4 player games, and when I select those columns, they show up completely empty. I have checked the mame.xml file and the data is there, it just doesn't show up in your editor.

I was just giving the mlgconverter a run through, converting my All Games mlg file. I know there's about 2600 entries in it, but the tool appears to get drastically slower as it worked through the list, clicking off the first hundred entries in just a few seconds, but my the time it got down about 2-400 entries in, each entry was taking more than a second.

For anyone interested, these are the entries that you HAVE to have mlgconverter make a working mlg. The first two lines are the rom name as they appear in the directory. "description" is what you want to appear in the MaLa game list. romPath is the path to the folder that this rom is in, with trailing /. "extension" is just the rom extension, without period.

STEP 1: Use the mame executable to create an XML file. I did mine by opening a command prompt (Run CMD) and typing "mame -listxml >mame.xml" (without the quotes)

STEP 2: Download and unzip the Catver.ini file. NOTE. The Catver.ini file you will get also contains version information, and is formatted slightly different than the versions this program was built for, so we will need to modify the INI file in order to make it usable in this game list editor.

STEP 2A: Open Catver.ini in Notepad or Wordpad (might as well use Wordpad since you need it for STEP 2B), and scroll about halfway down. There will be a blank line, then "[Veradded]", then the list begins again only with the version of MAME each game was added. Delete everything from this point down, its not needed for the Game List Editor and will just slow down parsing and increase the chance of the program crashing.

STEP 2B: IMPORTANT - Now, in Wordpad (I tried notebook, but it just locks up, wordpad worked great), click Edit and click Replace. In the 'Find what' textbox put " = " i.e. space equals-sign space, (dont add parenthesis), and in the 'Replace with' textbox put "=" i.e. just equals-sign, (dont add parenthesis). Basically, we need to remove the space before and after all of the equal signs, the program was written for older versions of the Catver.ini files, and the older versions didnt have those spaces, so the program wont work.

STEP 3. Move the catver.ini file into the Mala Gamelist Editor directory and overwrite the one that is currently there.

STEP 4. Run the program, follow the prompt and find the mame.xml file you created earlier, then allow it to load. When it finishes loading it will ask you if you want to load the Genre information, click yes and wait. At this point it will begin parsing the INI File, this is also the point where the program often crashed on me. If it crashes, just reload and when it finishes loading the xml it will again ask if you want to add the Genre info, keep doing this eventually it will work.

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If you need to change to a different mame.xml (for whatever reason) just open malagamelisteditor.ini file and delete the entry for MAMEDB=. Just delete anything after the = sign and save, and next time you load the program it will ask you to find the xml file.

Hopefully this saves someone a little bit of time. I found this program quite useful for making a more detailed tree/gamelist in Mala, which helps me get to specific games *very* quickly.